In a world with an intellectual history of seven thousand years behind it, where do Pakistanis stand, what are they doing, what do they aspire to be, and what ought they to be doing? This Blog takes Notes of all of that ...

Sunday, September 29, 2013

A
measure to measure a society’s level of culture and civilization is to see whom
it rewards most. In Pakistan, Javed Chaudhry is one of the few Urdu columnists
and television talk show hosts who are unimaginably highly paid.

The quality of
Urdu language he writes in his columns is precarious. The accent with which he
speaks Urdu in his talk show and the way he pronounces words may never be
approved by a refined taste. His arguments defy logic, his sources are un-scrutinized
and most of his information is misleading.
Yet he is one of the most popular Urdu columnists!

C.
M. Naim in his personal blog, www.cmnaim.com
has taken Javed Chaudhry to task regarding one of his columns, مذاکرات
سے پہلے, which published in a
national daily, Express, on September 17, 2013.

Mr.
Javed Chaudhry is a fairly experienced Urdu columnist in Pakistan. Presently he
writes a column titled ‘Zero Point’ in the Daily Express. For all I know, he
may also be anchoring some T.V. talk show owned by the Express Group. He has
however published several volumes of his evidently very popular columns. A few
days back he decided to write on the present abysmal state of governance in
Pakistan and the proposed talks with the Taliban. A noble and timely task. But
then he decided to open his column with a reminder of the fate of the last
Mughal Emperor—to underscore his argument that when a state’s writ disappears
the state itself soon disappears ignominiously. The column, sub-titled ‘Mazākarāt se Pahle’ ‘Before the Talks,’
appeared in the Daily Express of September 17, 2013. Here is
my translation of its ‘Historical’ prelude, a tour de force by any measure of
rhetoric and fantasy.

“Captain
Hodson was in charge of the operation. The last Mughal Emperor was alive.
Twenty-five crore Indians held him in honor. But Hodson knew that though the
State existed, the Emperor with his Prime Minister and advisors was present and
the Mughal currency was still the coin of the realm, the ‘writ’ of the State
did not exist. The Police had become ‘dysfunctional,’ the army had no life in
it, and decades had passed since the country’s judicial system had breathed its
last. People, first of all, didn’t go to the courts to seek justice, and if
they perforce did then the judges took five or ten years to decide the case.
And then, if a decision was announced no one put it into effect. The posts in
the administration were auctioned off to the higher bidder. If you wished to
become the Kotwal, then you contacted Mirza Mughal and made him an offering to
get the job. If you wished to become a Munshi or Mir Munshi, then you had to
contact the junior prince, Mirza Khizar and place a bag of gold coins in front
of him. If you were someone powerful, you could go out riding in the city, kill
a score of people, and then come home safe and secure. No one could touch you.
But if you were powerless and poor, then death was your fate anyway. You died,
whether due to indigence or under the hooves of the Turkish horse of some
prince or government officers. It didn’t matter.

“Captain
Hodson knew that when a state had become that powerless, even an army of
millions couldn’t save the country. And that is exactly what happened on 22
September 1857. At the final moments of that War of Independence, the Emperor
took refuge in Humayun’s Tomb. The princes were with him, as were six thousand
soldiers and heavy artillery. The six thousand were ready to lay down their
lives for the Emperor, but Hodson knew that if the Commander were weak and
unwilling to take up arms personally then even the most loyal soldier would
walk away from him. And so Hodson did something strange. He took only three
native soldiers with him, and rode his horse to Humayun’s Tomb. The aged
Emperor, sick and indolent from opiates, was standing, leaning on a staff. He
was so weak that his shoulders could not bear the weight of the royal robes nor
could his head bear the weight of the Timurid crown. The great state of
Hindustan had collapsed at its own feet (sic).

“Hodson
‘presented’ himself before the Emperor, bowed and offered his ‘salaam,’ then
made this offer: ‘If you surrender to me I guarantee the lives of you and your
queen.’ The last Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was then 82. He was up to
his waist in his grave but his lust for life compelled him to make the deal. He
pulled out his two swords from their sheaths, and handed them over to Captain
Hodson. One was the sword that Nadir Shah Durrani had presented to Emperor Muhammad
Shah before returning to Iran; the second was the sword that had belonged to
Jahangir and was traditionally given to a Mughal Emperor at his coronation.
Hodson took the two swords, and walked out triumphantly. When the six thousand
loyal soldiers saw the swords in Hodson’s hands they lost all will. They could
see their own future in the Emperor’s swords.

“Hodson
went and deposited the swords in the office of the Company Sircar, then took
one hundred native soldiers and returned with them to Humayun’s Tomb. He then
set ninety soldiers to that task of disarming the six thousand Mughal soldiers.
The remaining ten he took with him and arrested the two sons of the Emperor,
Mirza Mughal and Mirza Khizar, and influential grandson, Mirza Abu Bakr.
Placing the princes in an open buggy, he set out in Delhi. The people of Delhi
followed. Within moments there were four thousand spectators walking behind the
royal buggy. But not one man dared to raise a cry in support of the princes.
The procession reached the Kotwali. Hodson ordered the princes to step out of
the carriage and take off their clothes. They stood naked before four thousand
people when Hodson shot them dead and walked away leaving their naked corpses
in the dirt.

“The
corpses of the three princes remained lying by the road for three days and
vultures and beasts tore into them, but in the entire city of Delhi not one man
dared to take the corpses away for burial and prayers. Meanwhile, the ninety
troopers of Hodson disarmed those six thousand Mughal soldiers and marched them
back to the Red Fort. There in the open, they hanged them one by one. Only
those survived for whom no ready rope was available to the ‘gora’ force.
Bahadur Shah Zafar’s two swords are still with the English Royal Family, and
tell the owners every day that when a state becomes weak then kings surrender
to just three enemy soldiers, despite having six thousand soldiers standing by.
Hodson’s ten soldiers also proved that if the state had no life in it then only
ten soldiers could force princes to strip, and then shoot them down in front of
four thousand spectators. And the ninety soldiers of the British army sent a
clear message to all the conquerors in the world that if a state had no
strength in it then six thousand fully armed soldiers would throw down arms
before ninety enemy soldiers, and then lose their lives instead of gaining
safety.”

Whenever
I read such ‘historical’ accounts, and it is sadly too often, my first impulse
is to wonder: do Pakistani Urdu newspapers have editors and sub-editors? Or do
they have only wealthy and privileged owners, with hordes of cowering minions,
and a changing stable of fantasizing columnists? Some of the latter seem
equally privileged, for many often describe the meals and trips they enjoy with
assorted bigwigs of Pakistan. One of them, Abdul Qadir Hasan, only this week
wrote a column on poverty in Pakistan by describing why his three domestic
servants were not going home for the Eid—they could have more ‘meaty’ meals at
his house!

Returning
to the history lesson offered by Mr. Javed Chaudhry (henceforward JC), let me
begin by pointing out that when the British took Delhi in 1803, the city was
held by the Marathas, while the Fort itself was held by their French allies.
Emperor Shah Alam, blinded by Ghulam Qadir Rohilla—in revenge for having been
castrated by the Emperor earlier—had no say either in the Fort or in the walled
city. Forget the rest of the country. The Mughals had along ago been abandoned
by their erstwhile nobles who quickly had made their own fortunes. The most
prominent being Nizamul Mulk and his descendents in Hyderabad and Burhanul Mulk
and his descendents in Avadh. Neither cared a hoot what happened to the
Emperor. In fact, the Emperor was delighted when the British moved in, for they
gave him more money than the Marathas had. From 1803 onward, it was the British
who governed Delhi. The Emperor was in name; he had no army or police, not to
mention judges and magistrates. And his ‘writ’ was limited to the Red Fort, and
that too in compliance with the Resident’s wish.

Bahadur
Shah Zafar was not his father’s favorite. He gained the throne because the
British forced upon his father their own rule of primogeniture. JC should
recall that the traditional Mughal system was to kill all rivals, as happened
from Jahangir to Farrukhsiyar, when the noble in power chose the Emperor. And
the first thing any new Emperor did was to make sure the possible rivals were
killed, blinded, or held in house arrest. Actually, in the good old days, Zafar
would have got rid of both Mirza Mughal and Mirza Khizar, for he wanted Jawan
Bakht, the son from his favorite Zeenat Mahal, to be his heir. Not to the
throne but to whatever the British were in the mood to give. The two princes
made a bid for fortune during the Ghadar, and were despised by those who were
doing the fighting. Prior to 1857, they had no say even in the Fort. The walled
city was governed by the British. The Kotwal who sent Ghalib to jail for
gambling was an employee of the British, and not of the Emperor.

Coming
to the events of September 1857, here is what William Dalrymple tells us in his The
Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi 1857 (New York, 2007). No
doubt some would call him a ‘Gora Kafir,’ but he also happens to be a
meticulous scholar and quite sympathetic to Zafar. According to Dalrymple,
Zafar, with members of his immediate family and some retainers, had escaped
from the Fort by boat and took shelter in Humayun’s tomb on the 17th of
the month. The place was full of soldiers—around three hundred—and civilians
who had fled there with the same aim. On the 21st, Hodson went
there with a small contingent of native soldiers—they were probably Muslims and
Sikhs from Punjab—and got Zafar out of the tomb complex. Hodson himself did not
go inside; the Emperor rode out in a chariot—with the help of Hakim Ahsanullah
Khan, Mirza Elahi Bakhsh, and Maulvi Rajab Ali. Hodson delivered the Emperor to
the freshly established British civilian administration, and the Emperor and
Zeenat Mahal were confined to quarters within the Fort. The next day, Hodson
went to Humayun’s Tomb, and with his Indian helpers got the three princes to
surrender. There were several hundred jihadis in the tomb at
the time, plus hundreds more of ordinary men, women, and children. There were
three hundred or so more jihadisnot too far away in Basti
Nizamuddin. (Dalrymple’s total of six hundred became six thousand in JC’s
piece.) But no soldier made any effort to challenge Hodson on either day, nor
did any civilian. The three princes were killed in cold blood by Hodson, at a
place now known as the Khuni Darwaza. And yes, they were stripped naked before
they were killed. The corpses were then taken to the Kotwali in Chandni Chowk
and cast on the ground for display. Three days later they were buried in
unmarked graves. No soldier was taken into custody at Humayun’s Tomb and
marched back to the city to be hanged from the gallows.

What
happened at the tomb complex on two days clearly indicates the low esteem in
which the Emperor and the princes were held by most of the civilians and
soldiers who had sought shelter there. There was no issue of the Emperor’s
writ, for the poor man never had any, not even within the Red Fort. And many of
the elite and clergy of Delhi held him in much contempt before 1857 for his
peccadilloes and his inclination towards Shi’ism.

JC
should read Hasan Nizami and Rashidul Khairi again—they don’t indulge in
fantasies—if he cannot be bothered to read Dalrymple, or Mahmood Farooqui’sBeseiged:
Voices from Delhi, 1857 (New Delhi, 2010), an invaluable selection
(translated) from the Mutiny Papers in the National Archive of India. He may be
right about the two swords and their identities, but he is dead wrong when he
talks of the Timurid crown. The first Mughal king to wear a crown was Zafar’s
father, Akbar II; Zafar imitated him. And both had imitated the British
practice, as had the Nawabs of Avadh when the British made them Kings. The Mughals
in India, from Akbar onward had worn only turbans decorated with jewels and
crests.

Finally,
the British couldn’t have run out of ropes while hanging people. After all, the
same rope and knot is commonly used over and over again. Of course, reality
does not make for the rhetorical effect JC most desires. And so fantasy
triumphs over reality.(September 19, 2013)

The Blogger

The blogger cherishes a cosmopolitan spirit; he is a moralist; a rationalist; a philosopher; a political philosopher; he believes in Classical Liberalism, as a Theory of Conduct.
He has substantially contributed to the founding of the first free market think tank of Pakistan, Alternate Solutions Institute.
He is a writer who wrote / published dozens of articles on a variety of issues, and is author of 4 books.
He wrote / published short-stories in Punjabi, a regional language of Pakistan.
He composes poetry both in Urdu and Punjabi, and has already published one collection.